Finalist – Janice Chan
Janice Chan from the Victoria University of Wellington School of Architecture was a finalist in the 2018 NZIA Resene Student DEsign Awards with her project, ‘Pool as Piazza’.
Project description
A new urban swimming pool – a “Pool Piazza” – has been designed for a Wellington central city site just off Cuba Street. The project takes an experimental approach to urban design, imagining the pool as a vessel to explore various social and urban conditions, and to reframe typical inner city behaviours by borrowing from the playful and open typology of public baths. In its consideration of the typology, the project reveals the ongoing negotiation between city and subject, and seeks to achieve better results for both.
Citation
An imaginative and optimistic urban intervention turns a city-centre car park into a community space centred on a public swimming pool. The playful scheme is in keeping with the scale and character of a diverting neighbourhood in a non-corporate part of town; it is architecture of sympathetic accretion, rather than unwelcome imposition.
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